The City of Europa was designed around a single shot. The camera begins above a cathedral and pulls out until the city sits on an ocean of ice (Jupiter's icy moon, Europa). In the end, this was shot with 4 variations - with the option of a 3D (stereoscopic- see my 3d gallery) and green-screen matte.

I devised a rig that uses an SLR digital still camera to animate the camera motion. This also allowed sections of the foreground to be removed once out of the camera's sight. This same rig had a feature to slide the single camera side to side 3 inches (distance between your eyes) and a laser sight to triangulate a fixed focus point. Stereo images must converge on the focuse point (unless you want a headache). Since this pass would require over a thousand images, I wanted to make the rig as fool proof as possible.

The "ice" is actually melted down candle wax. Sheets were cast in wax paper moulds, broken, then melted together again. Each batch was tinted a little bit differently to create contrast.

The buildings are created from metal and sculpy clay. Each building was for welded together from and array of square tubing, rods, and wire. This was then sculpted on with an oven-bake clay. The advantage of the metal frame was not only strength- you could put the whole thing in your oven!